


Fragile Bones

by action-cat (clytemnestras)



Series: long daynights [1]
Category: Bandom, My Chemical Romance
Genre: Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Depression, Dysphoria, Genderfluid Gerard Way, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Mild Transphobia, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-02
Updated: 2015-02-02
Packaged: 2018-03-10 04:39:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,230
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3277073
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/clytemnestras/pseuds/action-cat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i> I don’t feel like a girl today, Frankie. I feel like a fucking prince</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fragile Bones

**Author's Note:**

> (warnings for depression and mentions of other disorders, explicit sex, aborted sex due to dysphoria - similar to safewording - and physical injury)

He meets _her_ first, which is strange, considering orientation and room assignments and the flurry of motion that makes the first few days of college so nauseatingly exciting.

(He assumes they just got caught in different slipstreams, when he thinks back on it later. He doesn't find out for a long while that it's because they started a week later than planned due to of impromptu hospitalisation. That doesn't change anything.)

Regardless, Frank meets her first, wrapped in an oversized hoodie and a tiny denim skirt, black tights splashed with red like blood splatter. She's grace in a skeleton, balancing a supersized coffee, a sketchpad and three textbooks with dextrous ease as she shifts to take a sip from the paper cup.The vendor laughs when she mutters under breath and never pulls out a purse to pay for her drink. She's a witch-girl with a caffeine lust. She's a demon, he can tell.

His indrawn breath makes him choke when smoke fills his lungs. He rests his cigarette between his teeth and tries not to feel like a complete dumbass. It isn’t something lyrical, not love at first eye-fuck; it’s _you’re attractive and i want to touch_.

Flicking the matted black hair from her face, she meets his eyes. She grins at him from across the quad, watching him watch her. He gets a tipped cup in invitation and he shakes his head at her with a smile, tossing his cigarette to the floor. Frank looks down as he stubs it out under his shoes, and when he looks back up, she’s lost in the swarm of people.

He thinks the year looks promising.

**

Obviously, then, when he meets him, Frank is shocked.

It's not that he isn’t an open minded guy - the opposite. Frank takes chaotic, messy people over box ticks; doesn't understand things that keep their colours inside the lines.

\- Still, a shock, to see him sat there in the same oversized hoodie (a cat scribbled on the back, _local witch_ a scrawl on the front), but with pants replacing the skirt and his feet up on the couch and a suitcase on the floor proclaiming to all the world that yes, he will be staying in this dorm with Frank. And he's really not a girl, not sat like he is, face drawn up in concentration - Frank can't actually make his brain reconcile it for the two long minutes he stands in silence.

He doesn't bother looking up from his comic book. "'sup, cigarette dude. I'm Gerard, but call me Gee 'cause it sounds less fucking stupid. Guess we're roomies."

When Frank doesn't reply, Gee looks up at him through the mess of black hair that gives him a kind of inverted halo - ethereal and awful all at once - with these ridiculous hazel eyes and Frank's stomach plummets straight through the floor.

He grins back at Gee and offers a hand. "Awesome, I'm Frank." He's sort of amazed his breath doesn't stutter when Gee takes his hand and shakes.

**

Gee's classes either don't start for a month or they just skip them entirely.

The dorm is a small place, a converted office on the edge of campus to accommodate increasing class sizes, and it's just Frank and Gee, a communal bathroom and a kitchen area with a couch thrown down. The two of them navigate around each other, camera parts squashed up alongside paint tubes and frayed brushes. It never feels too big or too small.

Frank falls in love with his white walls and Gee splashes their's with every colour they can find, murals of cats at wars with zombies and superheroes marching in mourning parades.

They smile at each other over coffee and dirt cheap, off-brand cereals for days, loitering in overstretched pyjamas and little else and chat mindlessly about home. Then one morning Gee gets up with her face fully made; petal-pink lips and spider-lashed eyes, fingernails shaped into points and painted red like they've done damage. Frank blinks away the soft focus but she stays stunning, and he feels his mouth fall open without the strength to clench it shut.

She scowls at  him over the breakfast bar.

"You gonna give me shit for dressing up like a fucking girl? Call me a fag or a tranny? Hell, maybe you'll mix it up and call me a fucking pussy, meow at me like I'm a sex kitten." She hisses the words with ache in her black rimmed eyes.

He meets her glare. "What could I say when I'm king of the fucking pansies? You look gorgeous, Gee."

The room lights up with her grin. He thinks that means he passed.

**

Gee stays up until early and sleeps until late and has a bloodstream that is roughly forty percent coffee, Frank thinks.

In the dorm room they seem to run on different time zones. His mornings get lost to squinted eyes in darkrooms and afternoons to catching brief moments of autumn-into-winter sun behind a viewfinder. He disassembles the campus into blues and whites and faded golds and hides every sneaked polaroid of paint splattered, ink stained hands under piles of printed raindrops.

Some days when he stumbles in, exhausted and reeking of developing fluid, Gee is only just tugging on clothes, grabbing pencils and shoving them into a satchel.

She smiles and never asks him for help zipping up her dress.

**

The first time Frank brings a guy back to the room, he's drunk and Gee's gone. He hushes the guy (Adam/Aaron/Aiden) as they stumble over the paper-littered carpet, roughly groping each other with Frank's fingers hooked in the guy's belt loops to drag him the right way. The guy rocks his hips and whines where his mouth is pressed up against Frank's throat.

There are no lights on under Gee's door, no noises but the heavy breathing against his ear, so Frank nods to himself and shoves the guy over the armrest of the couch, then follows him down.

"You can make as much noise as you want", he whispers as he pulls off his shirt.

The next morning he wakes up alone and covered over in a blanket that smells like smoke and potent perfume. His pants are hung up over the breakfast bar.

He shifts over as much as the couch will allow and spots a note folded over his coffee mug.

_Was it good for you too? A-dude left at like four when I got back. Condoms all over the fucking place so I think you're safe. You owe me a free night xx G_

__

Frank laughs so hard his head tries to explode. He finds a tube of berocca inside his mug.

**

Frank never asks and Gee never discloses it sober.

Frank sneaks the joint through the dorm and into his square-foot room, shoving his head out the window. Gee never ends up crashed on the same floors he does, never shares his red-rimmed eyes and they don’t judge each other for it. They don’t mention it.

He knows the smell follows through the walls but he can’t care, not when his hands are shaking and his shots are blurry and his mother’s voice drifts softly over phonelines in slow-motion whispers of packed bags and half-empty master bedrooms.

Gee pulls him back from the window before he lets himself fly off the edge and plucks the roll-up from his fingers, taking a long drag.

“Now we can both owe Joe a striptease, huh?” His words dance flat-footed in the space between their faces and he hears his voice lilt downwards.

Gee snorts and blows smoke in Frank’s face. “Joe can suck my left tit”, he says, rubbing two fingers over his breast to enunciate the point.

“Don’t give him any ideas, Jesus. Fucker’s weird enough all by his lonesome.”

They fall onto his bed, passing the joint between them, sharing hits when their lips accidentally touch.

The room spirals away in long yellow moments and Gee’s head on Frank’s pillow. The joint gets snuffed into nothing and they breathe, together.

“It’s not a game, y’know.” Gee blinks slowly or maybe the world is running slow motion, Frank can’t tell, can’t feel his feet where they’re tucked into Gee’s shoes.

“Never thought it was.” He coughs over his own voice.

“Good. I don’t feel like a girl today, Frankie. I feel like a fucking prince.”  He sits up, pushes his greasy hair into pointed spokes like a crown.

Frank lifts his hand, wide-eyed, and runs his fingers through Gee’s hair. “Sure thing your majesty.”

**

Frank hears stories about MikeyWay, through the basements and the clubs and the outdoor fucking dives. Everyone has a MikeyWay story.

Gee Way, MikeyWay. No relation, he assumes.

Then there’s a guy with too-tight jeans and cracked glasses passed out on his couch and when Frank taps him on the cheek a couple dozen times he asks blearily if Frank’s there to give him a blowjob.

(He tells him no, not sure if that’s the right answer or not. Mikey says it’s cool and makes himself some coffee.)

And then Frank has a MikeyWay story. And then Frank has twelve MikeyWay stories, a MikeyWay ex-hook up and MikeyWay’s phone number scrawled on his right ass cheek after one particularly ill-advised shot contest with Saporta.

Gee and Mikey are inseparable, he’s the sharp edge to all her soft and they both have this way of staring the world into bitter disrepair, conversing with closed mouths. So then it’s not _Frank-and-Gee_ it’s _Frank-and-Gee-and-Mikey_ in a haze of beer and punk and sarcastic laughter setting the campus on fire.

Then he and Mikey catch a mohawk with two thirds of a brain tries spraying _Tranny_ on their door, and gain twin black eyes and a track record for breaking noses. And then Mikey disappears back off to Belleville and the world learns to spin again.

**

Mikey seems to take Gee’s fight back with him.

She's around less and drunk more. She stumbles through classes without sleeping it off. He trips over her on more basement floors than he can count. Suddenly everyone knows her, has a story. And maybe the Ways have some special power, a thrall over dance floors that have crowds falling at their feet. Bewitching defined by beguiling green eyes.

But she doesn't recover like her brother, slip back into reality with the same ease. She stays lost in her own worlds and won't let anyone in.

Oceans flood the carpet in communal places, the kitchen an island between the shorelines of their separate bedrooms.

The dorm becomes a quiet place.

**

The first time Frank and Gee hook up it’s drunken and dark and dizzying.

Gee pushes Frank against the door when he gets three Fs and an N/A at the end of the semester, half painted canvases staring holes in them both. Gee smells like beer and weed and spilled ink. Frank thinks he can taste his own drunk breath on Gee’s lips. He knows he can feel his own pulse.

He flips them when they land on the couch, pulls off Gee’s clothes with rough tugs and ragged breaths and this should feel like a bad idea but it just feels like skin on skin.

They don't face each other.

Frank fingers him open slow but desperate and Gee yanks his hips back and forth, twists and bites down on Franks neck harshly until he “just fucking fucks him already.”

He pushes in fast and hard enough that they bruise each other’s thighs. Gee doesn’t come until Frank pulls out, three fingers fucking him through it until Gee yells and melts into the sofa in a shivering puddle.

When Frank wakes up, Gee is still cradled against his chest.

**

When Gee gets admitted, Frank isn’t there.

He’s staying with his Mom over winter break, pretending Christmas isn’t happening and hotel rooms are cosy as houses. He’s wearing red sweaters and getting a job as a mall elf when the manager starts giving them shit about the room. He’s visiting his dad with a placated smile and telling him he would never take sides.

He's shaving the sides of his hair off, he's having a ring pushed through his lip, he's giving a blowjob in the back of a tattoo parlour to pay the difference for words he has pressed into his back and he's not there, where Gee needs him, had no idea he was needed at all.

He’s not there, and he has no idea.

Frank gets back to the dorm on January fifth to MikeyWay living in Gee’s room, still crying into their pillow.

Frank climbs into the bed with him. Helps him throw out all the razors.

**

Gee comes back two days later smelling like floral shower gel and looking like a healed up scar.

Gee comes back with a questionable smile and a sun behind her eyes and _straight-ish edge_ written in marker on her arm.

He pours her whiskey down the sink so she doesn't have to.

(He never tells her this, but watching the alcohol filter down the drain and hearing her snoring softly in bed kind of breaks his heart for the first time. He didn’t even know he loved her, not yet.)

**

A happy Gee is a creative Gee, and she gets a painting submitted to a gallery installment for rising stars. For one week, the whole world is free to gape at blue and red haired cyborgs holding on to the end of existence. Purples and yellows rage a streaking war through the canvas, apocalypse in day versus night, new bruises laid upon healing ones.

She goes to the opening with cold sobriety and comes home with a girlfriend.

It's sometime between these moments Frank loses the ability to breathe.

**

Lindsey is curves and hard edges in bloody lipstick. Lindsey is smart and tactile and funny and awful. Lindsey is Nemesis in a plaid skirt.

Frank would wear a leash if he'd met her first.

His SD card maxes with shots of entangled calves in fishnets and lipstick prints on throats.

He thinks that the two of them are beautiful, sirens with split lips and battle scars.

Frank chooses to believe true love is a myth. He buys himself a new SD card and buys himself some frames and takes all of them into his room to covet in privacy.

He thinks they can probably hear him whimper, sliding his palm down his cock. He remembers the sound of them fucking. Relives in smokescreen memory what Gee feels like when they come.

He thinks he can hear applause when satiation drags him to sleep.

**

The first time Frank brings a girl back to the room, both Gee and Lindsey are there, tucked away in Gee’s bedroom and blasting The Misfits not quite loud enough get a police visit for noise disturbance.

Jamia is a tiny ball of joy and punk rock fury and they make out for ten minutes before she can’t help pushing him away, belting out the lyrics and twirling her small little frame around him and the rest of the dorm. He misses the feel of her body pressed against him so he follows after, swaying his body into her rhythm.

Linds and Gee wander out with flashbulb smiles and watch Frank and Jamia move. They don’t ask who she is, don’t say a word. The music gets turned up and four bodies litter the carpet and they all dance until their feet can’t take the strain anymore.

They fall into a tangle on the sofa, conversation gaps filled with guitar chords.The connection is instant, he feels himself surgically removed from Jamia’s mind by Lindsey’s deadly wit and Gee’s enchanting belief. He presses his face into her throat anyway. Breathes her in.

It won’t be a hookup, and yet somehow it’s fine. He’s warm and tired and everybody’s happy and maybe his friendship group is solely made up of people who look amazing in tiny skirts and could knock him out with a single blow.

He really can’t see a downside to this.

**

Gee falls slowly and carefully back into bad habits, treads water in the shallow ends of parties. She scrubs the straight-ish edge off of her arm after the first sip of beer, but Lindsey drags the second can from her lips and replaces it with her own mouth.

Easing her in.

He shifts in his seat, picks up his cup and puts back down again. He's ill. Not physically, infection an old friend but not his current fuckbuddy. But he's ill with the party and the feel of his own hand against his skin.

Lindsey moves onto the dancefloor and wraps herself around a friend, chatting out of sequence with the beat and Gee climbs into Frank's lap.

"Thank you," she whispers, twirling her fingers through the long-ish hair tickling the nape of his neck.

He doesn't ask what for, just presses a kiss into her temple. "Any time, Gee. Fucking always."

They go home mostly sober.

**

On Valentines Day, Frank breaks his DSLR. It’s not on purpose, but it’s not exactly an accident, either. He keeps his polaroid at a safe distance and eats a whole box of heart-shaped candy that tastes like sugary death.

Gee sleeps through his puking, Linds does not.

There’s a mug of ginger tea already waiting for him when he gets out. She’s sitting on the breakfast bar, swinging her legs back and forth and fiddling with his broken lens. He takes a sip and it stings his tongue.

“You’re gonna look after him for me, Frankie.” She doesn’t look up from the lens she flips between her fingers.

He spits a mouthful of tea back into the cup with a wince. “Huh?”

“Gee. Him, her, whatever they are today. Don’t let them pull the Icarus routine, the world’ll fall if Gee’s wings melt away.” She’s laughing like it’s bullshit, hates the sound of her own voice.

“And you?”

She lifts the lens to her eye and watches him through it. “My wings fell off a long fucking time ago, man.” She sighs and hops off the counter, drops his lens back into the camera bag. “I’ve got another installation, Frankie, and it’s on the other side of the country. But if I don’t take it then I’m living in a box on the sidewalk. I can’t let this pass.”

He grabs her without meaning it. Her shoulders are solid and strained under his hands. “Move in here. With us. You don’t have to leave, Linds.” I don’t want you to, he doesn’t say.

“I really do.” She kisses him on the cheek, then bites down on the gap between his neck and shoulder.

He resents that he doesn’t want to let her go.

Happy fucking Valentines.

**

She leaves at the end of the month. Everyone knows this. Everyone resents this.

(He looks back, after, realises it’s only been a month either side. But Lindsey has powers over time and relativity, and moments she fills draw out like horizons.)

Mikey stays the last week in February, on the couch when they’re filling moments of lost time, in with Gee when the Witchgirl goes away.

And one night the three of them pile onto the couch and put the laptop on the counter. They wrap up in duvets and popcorn and Romero dvds. They fall asleep in a pile of bodyparts to the sound of squelching flesh.

It seems fitting, almost.

**

The first time he wakes up naked in Gee’s bed he knows they didn’t fuck. He knows this because Gee's fully dressed in last night’s clothes and Mikey is pressed up along his spine and even when he’s hammered Frank just isn’t into that shit.

...And he _was_ hammered. May still be, going by the fairylights tickling the edges of his vision. They all were, on the Jack he wishes he hadn’t kept hidden under his canvassed prints. He hates his spinning head and his drunken, clumsy fingers and his broken fucking promises.

He has no duvet because all of it is twisted around Gee like folded butterfly wings and Frank wants to take a nosedive off of the science block with the way sickness fills up his insides. He presses his fingers to the faded marks Lindsey - and Gee, once - left on his neck then runs them through Gee’s hair.

_I’m sorry I fucked up_ , he can’t say out loud.

He’s too dizzy to sit up and his legs are too far gone to pull him up, so he closes his eyes and wills the world to disappear.

Which it does, and then doesn’t all over again.

**

March falls off the calendar uneventful and diseased. His photos reflect the drag of failed sobriety, the colours are muted and the subjects cold and pained. If spring arrives, no one tells him.

Gee lives in the same old sweatpants and smells like sweat and death. He hasn't washed his hair in weeks and it stiffens with grease, stays stuck when he slicks it off his face.

He makes art in fits of personality shifts. The teacher calls it schizophrenic, the gentle skyscapes siddled with bloody massacres. Expressive. Dynamic. Revolutionary.

Gee says he’s already got a fucking diagnosis, his art doesn’t need one and slices the canvas through with red. All Frank sees is sadness.

He shoots Gee as he paints. Compares the yellow splattered fingers with the red. They remain the same, still curled inwards around the brushes and clutching like he can't bear to let them go. Around thirty snapshots get lost to bitten fingernails and sweaty palms, dirty and desperate and sad.

Frank puts his camera down, brushes the twisted stray hairs from Gee's cheeks and kisses him goodnight.

The moment is soft and then it's gone and life goes on.

**

Gee crawls into his bed late one night. He’s not drunk, hasn’t taken anything, is just cold and alone and shaking in his nightshirt.

Gee curls up around Frank, presses his face into the hollow of Frank’s throat and burrows into the duvet like it’s a fallout bunker and the world is ending outside.

“Frankie, who the fuck gave winter permission to stick a knife in April?” His arms fold around Frank’s chest to anchor himself down.

“Not a fucking clue. But when I find them I’m gonna knock their head off.” Frank’s body curves to fit Gee’s without any real thought. He thinks the two of them might be off-model robots, glitching where people think it counts and pre-programmed to seek safety together. He thinks four AM is when the universe reboots and it’s kickstarting itself right inside his head.

Gee shifts so they’re eye to eye. “Promise you'll bring me that head on a plate?”

He kisses Frank’s response right off his lips then presses his head to Frank’s chest and falls asleep.

**

Frank jumps on Gee’s back and strokes her hair and points in the direction of the darkroom.

She pinches his ankle but gallops on anyway, lets him tug on her hood as makeshift reigns and he can’t hold on long enough to make it across the quad, just slides off and crumples into laughter on the grass. She flops down on top of him and drives an elbow between his ribs.

“For such a tiny guy you make a shitty jockey.”

He bats her clawed fingers away. “Babe, maybe I’m just floored by you.”

She pulls herself up with a wrinkled expression then hauls all for her weight down onto his belly. All the air leaves his lungs and he doesn’t stop laughing for an instant.

**

Frank doesn't mean to adopt a kitten. Honestly, he's a dog guy and cats are fey creatures of fluff and resentment.

And yet.

He's an idiot.

"You're a fucking idiot", Jamia tells him in a soft, cooing voice as she brushes her fingers down the kitten’s nose. "Isn't he, Precious? Isn't Frankie a fucking idiot?"

Frank pouts and pulls the tiny calico away from her. "She's not staying. But. Jamia, she was crying in a chewed up cardboard box. It was raining, she could have _died_."

“You could lose your scholarship." She looks at him like that means a whole lot more than his degree. His bones suppress a shudder.

"No one on campus checks on me and Gee's dorm, no one cares. Next time Mikey comes down he can take this stupid fur ball back to Belleville and no one will lose anything."

"Believe yourself so someone does, Frank."

He bundles the little mewling thing into his jacket, pressed up against his chest and runs from the coffee place back to the dorm. The kitten mews loudly when a raindrop lands between her eyes.

He's hardly in the room before Gee is grabbing the thing from him and fawning over it, lying on the floor and letting tiny kitten paws journey up and down her belly.

He rolls his eyes and shucks off his wet coat and shirt, flopping beside her on the carpet. "Semi-permanent houseguest. Semi."

"Blah blah", she brings the kitten up to her face and rubs her nose against the cat's fluffy cheeks. She drops the cat on her chest and turns her head towards Frank.

"We have a baby together now," she says, deathly serious. "You can never be rid of me."

He laughs and scritches the kitten’s head. "Name your fucking baby already."

**

They manage to keep Ziggy a guarded secret for the entire month of April before Mikey can steal her back to Belleville.

Well, guarded is a relative term. Saporta and Beckett hardly left their couch the whole time the kitten was in residence and spoiled the fluffball rotten with endless costumes and toys. Gee embraced the claw and tooth marks on the edges of her paintings, incorporated them into the designs and Frank captured tiny footprints on their carpet in black and white inks and the end of the world seemed distant.

It’s strange, after, to not wake up with a light weight on his chest and not find bundles of soft fur all over the carpet. He’s kind of horrified. He misses a fucking _cat_.

“A cat, Gee, a fucking _cat_.”

She pulls Frank up on the sofa so he’s between her legs, pressing up against his chest. “Ziggy was our baby and she will be sorely missed. And Mikey will take great care of her and she will forget we ever existed and we will have to have a candle-lit vigil in her memory. Or a moment of silence, at least.”

Frank laughs and twists so he’s facing her and presses his nose up against hers. Her hair tickles his cheeks every time he takes a breath and then his mouth brushes down and they’re kissing, closed-mouthed and delicate like the two of them might shatter.

Gee pulls back for air, then leans back in.

**

 

Frank can’t keep his hands off Gee. He pushes him up against the cupboards when they meet in the kitchen,  wraps his legs around his hips when they curl up on the couch, laces his fingers through Gee's when they share coffee on the quad and settle together in the grass.

It isn't possessive, no matter how much he wants to cover Gee in himself, he just can't believe that he can touch, spread his fingers out along Gee's skin and it not mean anything more than it does. No one notices the new inward curve of their bodies, and he wonders if any if it is really new at all.

Nothing changes, not really.

(That isn't a problem yet.)

**

The music that filters through the dorm is a gentle distraction when Gee leans down to lift her skirt, legs spread wide on the edge of her twin bed. She’s bare and smooth and hard when Frank settles between her thighs.

He mouths along the soft scape of her thighs, dragging his teeth along the pale skin and streaking it pink, soothing back over each line with his tongue. She looks like a sunset with clouds streaked across in shocking white and he wants to chase that fragility but then she’s whining low and desperate and her cock twitches every time his cheek ghosts over it in pursuit of marking her up. He kisses the crown and runs his tongue along the slit until she quivers for him, then he closes his fist around the base and pumps slowly, achingly slowly. He covers his teeth with his lips and sucks her down.

Gee thrashes under him, and Frank gets his free hand settled on her hip, pinning her to the bed. His tongue curls around her, laves little circles under the head and traces the underside vein to maker her dizzy. She keens and thrusts up into his mouth with every movement, mindless with his touch.

She quivers and shakes and twitches and then she goes slack under him, silent and sudden, and doesn’t come. Her hand presses against his forehead and pushes him off and he finds her eyes wet when he can see them.

“Frankie I can’t.”

Frank can feel his insides collapse. He swoops up and pulls her into his arms. “Shh, baby no it’s okay it’s okay.” Warmth blossoms through his shirt where her face is cradled.

She cries and heaves and sniffs into his chest and lets him hold her tight. “I’m a girl, Frankie. I’m a girl and I’m hard and I can’t. I fucking can’t I’m so sorry.”

“No, no, shh. I have you.”

Covers come up and they fall and fall asleep.

**

He loses Gee in the crush of people. The room is loud and angry and swelling around him, bodies pushing too-close to his, drinks too strong for him to stomach.

Frank kind of wants to die.

He’s bracketed and surrounded and the music is wrong and his head is screwed on too tight and the Jack in his belly is burning holes through his insides and he has to find Gee and get outoutout before the world explodes.

Frank catches the slice of black that cuts through the candy-painted crowd and reaches out for Gee, pulls him into Frank and away from the chaos.

Gee spills his drink over his shirt. “Fucking hell Frankie,” he slurs. “Leave me alone I’m having fun.”

Gee looks like last night’s sex and smells like sweetened liquor and Frank can’t help heaving. “I’m leaving. Do what the fuck you like.” He turns and cuts through the writhing crowd, lungs begging for clean air.

“I will. I’m not your fucking boyfriend, Frank, don’t try to make me one.” It’s nasty and meant to be cutting. It’s a predesigned bomb to blow him apart because Gee’s in that place Frank is supposed to keep him from and he can’t because Gee doesn’t want him to and everything hurts.

He thinks he may have thrown up in Gee’s bed, but he can’t remember.

**

Gee makes the best pancakes Frank has ever tasted.

She makes them with eyeliner still smeared across her cheeks and hangover a dead weight on her shoulders and with her lips fused shut.

They aren't a sorry.

She pushes them across the bar and doesn't look sheepish or guilty or anything but sad. She doesn't save any pancakes for herself and doesn't watch him eat.

She locks herself in the bathroom and showers until the hot water runs out, then she goes back to bed. Frank follows. He doesn't say anything, just climbs in beside her and lets himself get warm.

**

Summer spills in with stickiness and fantastic lighting. Honestly, his shots have never looked better. Sharp shadows cutting through gold where it streams through the blinds and onto almost-bare skin, falling through in silver shafts onto umade sheets and peeled off clothes. Daylight catches a lot of their half-truths behind a camera lens.

Gee flits between elation and depression in smooth transitions. Frank learns he can’t stop it or save them from it. Not with kisses or blankets or promises to God.

And somehow it never stops him curling up inside when Gee stumbles in drunken and bruised; when Gee won’t leave the bedroom and won’t paint a thing.

He crawls up into Frank’s arms and gets lavished with kisses and draped in blankets and promised in whispers to God anyway, because love isn’t amenable and doesn’t learn.

“Why do you still try for me?”

Frank passes Gee his cigarette and he takes a drag and passes it back. Frank doesn’t really have an answer for him.

He stubs out the cigarette on the table and appreciates the burn mark it leaves. He’ll take a photo of that later, add it to the pile of un-revelations about life with Gee. “Ask me that when I stop trying and maybe I’ll have a fucking answer.” It comes out colder than he means it to.

It’s sticky and sweaty where they press together, too warm. Neither of them move.

**

Gee opens Frank up slowly, spread out on his own bed, legs wide and fingers twisted round the bed sheets.

Gee has two fingers pushing up into him, knuckle-deep, so slick and so good and Frank is out of his mind. Gee’s been sat between his legs for twenty minutes now, just spreading him open and teasing and Frank isn’t going to last when he pushes inside, he can’t, not when he’s so strung out. He’s never been this hard, this fucking desperate in his entire life and it feels so good that he doesn’t even care.

One wrong move and he could shatter apart, but oh fuck, he could stay like this forever.

Gee twists his fingers inside him, nudges his prostate and a shuddery moan is dragged straight out of his throat. “God, fuck, please, oh, please, fuck…” He doesn’t know what he’s saying, what he needs, just more.

Gee laughs and slides his fingers out, and Frank whimpers. Gee strokes down his chest, soothing as he lines up, slick and ready. He rubs the head up against Frank, still teasing, then guides himself inside with one long thrust.

Frank can’t make his thoughts work. Gee stretching him open just feels like relief, he’s so full and slick and covered with him. He’s making noises, he can hear them but can’t make them stop. Frank hitches his legs up over Gee’s hips, squeezes his ankles together. He needs to pull Gee deeper, keep him inside. His whole body jerks with every thrust and his cock rubs up against Gee’s stomach with sticky-hot friction. He’s never been fucked like this before, never needed anything like he needs Gee to be deep inside and pressed up close and covering from all sides, overwhelming him from inside out.

Gee’s hand trails down his chest, flicks against his nipples, drags nails along his ribcage then wraps his hand around Frank’s cock. It’s so much. Too much. He comes hard over Gee’s hand and stomach, keeps rocking his hips down into Gee’s thrusts until he goes still inside him.

Frank goes boneless and tries to remember how to breathe, but falls asleep before he does. Gee kisses him when his eyes fall shut.

**

Frank sits for her one hot June day. It seems fair, after the countless images he has of her on memory cards and hard drives and framed on his walls. She has him sit on the couch with his shirt undone and his hair spiked into points and he waits.

Her hair is pulled into a tiny ponytail on the top of her head, her shirt is paint-splattered and only reaches the top of her thighs, shifting when she moves with the sweep of her brush. Her left thigh-high has slipped down to her ankle and her tongue pokes out of the side of her mouth when she studies him, eyes alight.

It’s all he can do not to surge forward and pull her to the floor, to just hold her down and rub off all over her. He feels fifteen and it’s fucking glorious.

She flicks her paintbrush once more against the canvas then shoves it aside before pressing her palms into the paint.

“Get up, get the fuck over here.” Her smile twinkles with something dangerous and he inhales sharply stepping right into her space. She presses her hands onto his chest, marking him with blue and purple paint. She shoves the shirt off his shoulders and runs her fingers all across his chest, streaking it in colour.

She leans forward and kisses him, hard. She bites down on his lips and whispers _, “Undress me.”_

His fingers fumble with her buttons before she’s finished speaking. He yanks the cotton shirt off and presses their bodies together, rubbing his chest over hers, his cock grinding down on her thigh. He grabs her waist and lifts her into his arms, laying her out on the floor. She isn't wearing underwear and he grinds his hips on to do hers, making her moan. She's just as hard as he is.

Her chest is streaked with paint from his body, an imprint of him over her. He wants to take pictures of her like this, wild and covered in him. Their hips move together, too dry and too frantic but too good to stop, just rubbing together.

Frank comes first with a shout, spills all over Gee's cock and her hand is there in a second, working herself hard and fast. She comes over her fist before Frank has rolled onto his side.

"Hot", he gasps, panting into her shoulder.

"Yeah", she agrees. "We are."

**

Mikey's hospital admittance shakes Gee hard. It hits Frank pretty squarely in the gut, too.

Mikes wasn't the one who was meant to have the problems. Of all of them, he was the one with the hope, with the a-okay bill of mental health. Except, well, not, because the woman on the phone is telling him Mikey has bipolar and that Gee needs to get the fuck home and hug her baby brother.

And Gee is out the door before Frank can say "Let me come with you."

 

**

The painting stops, the attendance stops. The drinking comes back with gnashing teeth and wild friends, pills and tabs and question marks Frank doesn't want an answer to.

Fights end in hatesex then stop ending at all, screaming melting to tears and slammed bedroom doors. He's too scared to leave Gee alone and when they don't open the bedroom door he sleeps on the couch waiting for the door handle to turn.

It rarely does.

But on those nights Gee just tucks themself under Frank's arm and cries softly. "I'm scared, Frank. It was meant to be me, not him. I wasn't meant to fuck him up."

"Gee, no that's not on you. Baby, no."

They wipe their eyes on his sleeve. "Tell that to the nurses, Frank."

**

Mikey comes out of hospital and things get better apart from all the ways they don't. He comes and stays, which keeps Gee away from bottles and broken glass, and he brings Ziggy back which keeps everyone focused on other thoughts. She trails through the dorm in fuzzy distractions, bigger and still more precious than she was before, especially to Frank. She curls up on his pillow at night and her breathing helps him find sleep.

Gee focuses everything on her brother. She gets up just to make him food that she won't even eat, forces him into clean clothes when she stays in sweats for days on end. He never looks any better and she looks worse.

Frank hands the cat over to William and Gabe for the weekend and takes Gee and Mikey back to Jersey, takes them to a hotel on the edge of nowhere and gives them three days with the sand and the ocean.

The sun tries to wash him clean and he presses his toes into the sand when they splash around in the water and Gee runs over to him, covers him in her wet body and shivers into him until she steals the sun warmth for herself. Mikey lies at their toes wrapped in a towel and averts his whenever their faces gets too close for his "innocent eyes."

Frank force feeds them both ice cream and builds castles because that's what you do when you're by the sea and everyone smiles for the hours that the sunlight trickles through.

It feels like happiness for a lazy weekend and then it's gone and it takes joy back with it. But it was good, for a while, and them memory lingers like the sand left in his shoes.

**

With Mikey back home and the school year ending things should get easier for them. Frank turns in his final pieces with equal parts fear and elation. The photos say too much.

They say everything.

But Gee's final canvases are worse; angry narratives of fear and coldness. An ice ruler sits on a lone blue throne, surrounded by flames. He holds her shaking hands and her smiles don't get as far as her eyes, but they try. It's worth more than the world could know.

And then the parties spring up in wildfire chaos, drinks just passed from one dorm room to the next and passed into Gee's hand and then his grip on her fingers slips and she's dragged into the flames.

He finds himself in someone's room, hotboxing and passing the bowl back and forth between guys he can't remember meeting before. He let's the smoke fill up his insides and cover the things he won't let himself understand.

He falls asleep with his head pillowed by a stranger's crotch and their fingers carding through his hair, cooing at him like he's a kitten.

**

The text wakes him from a dream about mermaids dragging angels to the ocean floor, feathers floating on top of the waves.

_cnt get bck thru th wndw. sv me_

Frank is running before he works out what it means.

The night air hits him like a slap of sobriety and he destroys flowerbeds when he runs, needs to get to Gee before the world ends. And there she is, sat on his window ledge and clinging to the bricks with bloody fingers.

"Frankie!" She yells, tear tracks down her cheeks. The window must have slid shut behind her. "I needed the air, Frankie I messed up and I'm scared." Her legs swing off the will with jerky movements. He spots her phone, smashed apart on the ground.

"Don't move, Gee. I'm gonna come up there and open the window, okay? Just don't move." He's shaking all over, can't think straight. He needs to pull her back to him she's too far she's too close to falling.

Her eyes go huge. "No, Frankie, you can't leave me I need to see you. I'm so scared." One hand lifts off the exposed brick wall and touches her chest, quivering.

"I have to get you," he yells and steps toward the door.

_"Frankie no!"_

The world stops and shakes and Gee's body slides off the ledge.

Frank's mind takes a leave of absence.

She falls down and it should look like a feather in an updraft, floating, with how frail and small she is, but it isn't. Gee plummets right down. The floor meets her, not the other way around.

He screams because she doesn't, not even when she cracks against the floor and her eyes are open but she's not awake and flashing lights are bundling them both into the back of an ambulance and Frank's eyes just forget how to open.

**

Frank wakes up in a waiting room, Gee tucked up on a trolley and passing through metal doors. She's small and alone and painted head to toe in red.

He gets up to go after her and a nurse holds him back. "Nuh uh, son. Family only. You can stay out here long as you like." She's stout and tiny and has eyes like titanium.

His brain doesn't line up with his mouth. "But I am family."

The nurse's eyes melt into something soft. "Sweetie, Gee's been in this place a few times before. I know the brother and you're not him. I'm sorry but you have to stay out here. I'll tell you if anything happens, I promise."

"But." He doesn't mean to say it, hardly thinks it at all. "We were gonna get married."

The air rush hits him like a physical blow when the door swings shut.

**

Gee's spine has a fracture, but it'll heal. His ribs are badly bruised and his nose is broken just like several fingers and toes and he finds it hard breathing but tries to anyway. He's bandaged and stitched and pale as death under fluorescent lights, white and black and blue.

He tells Frank over and over how sorry he is and how much he loves him but sometimes he wakes up so pained and glassy-eyed that Frank doesn't think Gee sees him at all. He communes with the ghosts. The medication is strong enough that he doesn't feel a thing.

(Frank tells him after that he felt everything and more. It's funny in how it's only half a lie.)

When they release Gee to recover back home Frank refuses to leave his side. He goes home with the Ways and sleeps on a mattress with Mikey on the floor of the basement. Donna sits on the doorstep and shares silent cigarettes with him when inside the house smells too much like disinfectant. Elena makes him dinners and holds his hand when Gee gets too tired and they watch him sleep off the accident until it's just another faded scar.

Elena tells him he can stay as long as he's breathing. Frank cries into her shoulder every time she offers.

**

When Gee's okay to walk again he sneaks into the bed with her, careful of the bruises, and holds her to his chest.

"It won't ever be like this again, Frankie. The counsellor is nice and I trust her. I'm not touching alcohol unless I'm setting something on fire."

He buries his face in her neck and breathes her in. Her pulse jumps under the rub of his nose. "I love you."

She smiles against his hair. "Love you back."

**

Summer browns into autumn and Frank has to go back to school knowing Gee will come back when the therapy sessions are less urgent. Their new dorm is just as small and twice as lonely as before, with a ground floor view onto the new flowers littering the quad.

He fills the empty space with frames, a thousand snapshots of Gee and Mikey, of Ziggy and Lindsey and Jamia. The room is covered with photos of life until it can build one of its own. He has the canvas of him, spiky haired and shirt undone hanging right beside the door.

Ziggy looks up at him over the edge of his duvet. The school met Helena's death-stroke eyes and the code of conduct got a Ziggy amendment added in. She climbs up onto his pillow and presses her forehead against his with a bump.

"I know, Zig, but Gee'll be back soon " He scritches behind her ears and she preens for a moment then slinks off for better pastures.

He closes his eyes against his pillow and falls into an almost-sleep. His phone drags him back out of it.

"Hello?" He yawns down the line.

"Hey babe. Thinking about me yet?" Gee laughs down the phone but it catches on a wince.

"Always." He doesn't pause to think.

Gee's voice drops low, husky in his ear. "And what are you thinking about right now, huh? Because I've got a pretty fond memory of your mouth on my cock spiralling through my mind right this second."

"Oh really?"

"Really really, Frankie. Have you _seen_ your fucking lips?" Gee laughs and keeps talking, low and rough.

Frank tugs at his clothes and let's Gee's voice carry him away.

 

_** epilogue **_

Gee blinks up at him through the sleepy haze of Saturday afternoon sunlight. “Hi baby.”

Frank smiles, sleepsoft and hazy. “Hey.” He shifts in the bed so his body presses closer. He’s half hard but it’s a lazy thing, no urgency at all. “So”, he whispers against her lips, “can I ask you a question?”

Gee’s hips rock forward into Frank’s and Gee’s hand slides down between them, cupping Frank through his boxers. “Hmm?” Gee blinks and presses their lips together. It’s a lazy, fumbling kiss, too sleepy to be anything else, and it’s nice. It’s almost perfect.

Frank leans back. “I was just wondering who I’ve got in my bed today. Do I have a girlfriend or a boyfriend?” He rocks up into Gee’s hand and gets a small squeeze in return.

Gee’s tongue pokes out of the side of their mouth. Their hand moves over him slowly, a tiny smile touching her lips. “You know Frankie? I think I might just be your Gee today.”

 ****  
He rolls over so he’s on top of Gee, pressing them down into the mattress. “That works for me.” He gets a hand in Gee’s hair and drags them up for a kiss. There isn’t really anything Frank would rather hear.


End file.
